I'm just finishing a book I stumbled across on my mother's bookshelves, Studs Terkel's 1986 Chicago. A slender volume, it consists of a rambling, often poetic essay on the city, interspersed with photographs of both the famous and the mundane. Terkel wrestles to capture the two-faced nature of his hometown, where the only permanent feature is constant change, producing alluring combinations of beauty and horror.

Using his trademark tool of oral history, he repeatedly tells the tale of how a "sense of delight" flickers up, only to be torn down again. There are, for example, the exterior wall paintings that dot Chicago neighborhoods (including today's Hyde Park), some by masters, some by neighborhood kids. Terkel writes:

And along Milwaukee Avenue and other Northwest Side outsides, you'll find an authentic Carl Yasko. And John Weber. And Kathy Kozan and Sachio Yamashita. By the time this rambling essay appears, who knows how many of these works-that-light-up-the-street will still be up? Things in this town come fast and go fast, man. (p. 69)

Another section consists of man-in-the-street (and woman-in-the-street) interviews conducted as Picasso's famous statue on Civic Center Plaza was unvelied: what is it, they all wonder, tossing off wondrously imaginative speculations.

History is all around you, Terkel intones: the ghosts of Carl Sandburg, Mahalia Jackson, Nelson Algren, Louis Sullivan surround us. And yet they also disappear in the twinkle of an eye, devoured by the urge to development that seems written into the city's DNA.